Category: Crisis care and grounding
Crisis care and grounding
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Three types of trigger … Three techniques for taming
All I did was walk into the kitchen and pick up a cloth. But the sudden waft of bleach flung me far, far back into some childhood memory. I switched to a traumatised part of myself. I had been ‘triggered’.
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Caring for yourself: aspects to consider from the mental health act and mental capacity act
Rather than engaging with mental health services because we trust that they will be helpful, many of us—rightly or wrongly—fear any involvement with them partly because we fear losing further control by being ‘sectioned’. We fear losing our liberty, losing the right to make decisions about our life, and losing the right to choose the kind of treatment we receive.
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Lasting Power of Attorney
If you don’t have an LPA, many decisions will be taken on your behalf either by medical professionals or your next of kin or relatives. In situations where you have a domestically violent partner or spouse, or abusive parents, this could put you in a very worrying situation.
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Managing flashbacks
Coming to terms with flashbacks—understanding what they are, learning how to manage them, and eventually figuring out how to reduce them—is a cornerstone of recovery. Carolyn Spring explains what goes in the brain during a flashback and how to learn to manage them.
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Suicide – to be or not to be
I could cope with it no longer. Every part of me—eyelids, throat, bowels—everything was clenched tight in a ball of furious unbearability. This feeling—such a feeling!—loomed up over me like some prehistoric sea-monster, ready to snap me up and devour me, ready to pilfer my bones and pick apart my brain. This feeling was too much.
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My experience of dissociative identity disorder: crisis care
I had no idea where I was, except—rather obviously—that I was on a beach. It was raining and I was soaking wet. My legs were drenched up to the knees, indicating that perhaps I’d been in the sea. It was dark and late and freezing cold. I put my hands in my pockets and felt sea-shells. The policewoman told me where I was but it didn’t make any sense.
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Managing triggers: part two – turning down the smoke alarm
After trauma our brains are sensitised to threat and our amygdala – our brain’s ‘smoke alarm’ – tends to react to burnt toast as if the house is on fire. In this article Carolyn Spring shows how to turn down the sensitivity of our smoke alarm – and overcome the impacts of trauma.
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Managing triggers: part one – why triggers are nothing to be ashamed of
One of the hardest things I found in dealing with triggers was the aftermath: the shame, the self-blame, the sense of failure and powerlessness that once again something had happened that I’d had no sense of control over.
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Coping with crisis
Crisis makes sense. The adrenaline of it can become addictive, or be all we’ve known. Life doesn’t feel right if things aren’t frantic, if relationships aren’t disastrous. Crisis can be an attachment cry. Crisis is the language of emotions that we don’t know how to regulate.
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Be kind to yourself: self-care and the golden goose
For a long time, therapy sessions would end with a fairly typical exchange. I would express frustration at myself for not doing enough, and gently but firmly the response from my therapist would go, ‘Be kind to yourself.’
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